Is the word “vegan” a word that should be shunned?

So many authors and practitioners in the field of plant-based nutrition today are shunning the word vegan in favor of less strong terms such as “plant-based”, or “plant-strong” when it comes to the promotion and marketing of a vegan diet to the public. Yes, it may be true that “plant-based” sounds so much more benign and much more inclusive than does the term vegan. The word vegan may scare people away because some people associate it with “radical idealism” and/or “radical agendas”. But stop and think about this. What is so “radical” about veganism? Should we shun the word or should we be embrace it? I go back and forth on this all the time – people tell me don’t say you are vegan or that you promote a vegan diet because you will lose business. However, more and more I find myself becoming unsettled that the word vegan has to be “hidden” away in a dark corner of the closet just so we practitioners can gently coax people into eating plants and not animals.

It is ridiculous to think that the radical idea is veganism when it is the only logical and humane approach to eating. Radical is raising animals to be killed just so we can eat them. We don’t have the “right” to eat them as they are not our property.

I am growing more tired and more weary of playing “food” word games. No more closet veganism. Human food comes from plants, period